Camp was all very well, but I was growing too old for it, and Bill Unsworth was already too old, though he was a little younger than I. When the camp season finished, about the middle of August, he asked me and two other boys to go with him to a summer place his parents owned which was in the same district, for a few days before we returned to Toronto. It was pleasant enough, but we had had all the boating and swimming we wanted for one summer, and we were bored. Bill suggested that we look for some fun.

None of us had any idea what he had in mind, but he was certain we would like it, and enjoyed being mysterious. We drove some distance—twenty miles or so—down country roads, and then he stopped the car and said we would walk the rest of the way.

We struck into some pretty rough country, for this was Muskoka and it is rocky and covered with scrub which is hard to break through. After about half an hour we came to a pretty summer house on a small lake; it was a fussy place, with a little rock garden around it—gardens come hard in Muskoka—and a lot of verandah furniture that looked as if it had been kept in good condition by fussy people.

“Who lives here?” asked Jerry Wood.

“I don’t know their names,” said Bill. “But I do know they aren’t here. Trip to the Maritimes. I heard it at the store.”

“Well—did they say we could use the place?”

“No. They didn’t say we could use the place.”

“It’s locked,” said Don McQuilly, who was the fourth of our group.

“The kind of locks you open by spitting on them,” said Bill Unsworth.

“Are you going to break a lock?”

“Yes, Donny, I am going to break a lock.”

“But what for?”

“To get inside. What else?”

“But wait a minute. What do you want to get inside for?”

“To see what they’ve got in there, and smash it to buggery,” said Bill.

“But why?”

“Because that’s the way I feel. Haven’t you ever wanted to wreck a house?”

“My grandfather’s a judge,” said McQuilly. “I have to watch my step.”

“I don’t see your grandfather anywhere around,” said Bill, sweeping the landscape with his eyes shaded by his hand like a pirate in a movie.

We had an argument about it. McQuilly was against going ahead, but Jerry Wood thought it might be fun to get in and turn a few things upside down. I was divided in my opinion, as usual. I was sick of camp discipline; but I was by nature law-abiding. I had often wondered what it would be like to wreck something; but on the other hand I had a strong conviction that if I did anything wrong I would certainly be caught. But no boy likes to lose face in the eyes of a leader, and Bill Unsworth was a leader, of a sort. His sardonic smile as we haggled was worth pages of wordy argument. In the end we decided to go ahead, I for one feeling that I could put on the brakes any time I liked.